William Safire

Excerpts from the chapter "The Way to
San Jose" from William Safire's Before the Fall: An Inside View
of the Pre-Watergate White House (New York: Tower Publications, 1975).

I am putting this up on the WWW because of a conversation my brother
and I had about historian Alan Brinkley (whom I generally like very much)--how
he more-or-less made fun of Theodore White's belief in The Making of
the President 1968 that the demonstrators had to be driven back
from the Democratic Convention in Chicago or American democracy at risk.
My brother Chris said that from the perspective of anyone who remembered
the 1930s: Hitler, Mussolini's March on Rome, French Fascist mobs threatening
the Chamber of Deputies and inducing the resignation of democratically-elected
governments--the anti-democratic face of the end-of-the-1960s demonstrations
must have been terrifying, and a cause for true concern that this was the
way that democracy had begun to fall in Europe before World War II.

And that reminded me of this passage from William Safire's Before
the Fall, which when I first read it (in the late 1970s), almost
turned me into a Republican.There is an interesting passage in the diary of Nixon's Chief of Staff,
H.R. Haldeman, that suggests that Safire's
outrage and terror at the San Jose clash with the demonstraters was exceptional;
that Haldeman's view, at least, was much more gleeful--that the Nixon team
had decided to delay its departure from the auditorium in the hope of triggering
some protester violence, and had won political points by succeeding in
getting pictures of protesters throwing rocks at the presidential party--and
thus that there was more justice on the side of the press's reaction than
Safire would have admitted then.

...The motorcade rolled into San Jose with the advance car of photographers
shooting back at the President's limousine.... I was in the next to last
bus, and could hardly believe what I saw.

Obscene signs were nothing new, and the chant of "One, two, three,
four, we don't want your fuckin' war" had long since lost its shock
value; demonstrators had plagued both parties since the late 1960s.... Ordinarily,
they worked their disruptive schtick in groups of 20 or 30, popping
up in an otherwise friendly crowd, but that night in San Jose was different.

Slowing down as we approached the civic auditorium, we were teated to the
screams, howls, and roars of the representatives of the outer fringes of
the counterculture. A screamer would look in our windows, lock onto one
person's gaze, yell an oath, and make a gesture with arm or middle finger.
Hundreds upon hundreds of them, faces contorted, worked up into a froth
of hatred, doing everything a body can do with voice and gesture to express
loathing and disgust. This was a lynch mob, no cause or ideology involved,
only an orgy of generalized hate....

Their plan was to throw only epithets on our way in; a more serious onslaught
was reserved for later. Inside the hall, five thousand tense and worried
supporters made up the auditorium "rally"; Senator George Murphy
and Governor Ronald Reagan spoke to warm them up, but even before the President
came on, the sound of a battering ram was heard. The hall was actually,
not figuratively, besieged; the demonstrators outside envisioned it as a
drum to beat upon; the staff, after a few nervous self-assurances that this
kind of thing only helped our cause, began to worry about getting out safely
with the President. The people in that hall, ourselves included, were at
once defiant and fearful, a state which is at the least a tribute to the
success of the mob's attempted intimidation. The Secret Servic emen, who
always had seemed too numerous and too officious before, now seemed to us
like a too-small band of too-mortal men.

Let the President describe the scene, from the reading copy of the speech
he gave on the subject a few days later....

Thursday night in San Jose, I spoke to a crowd of 5,000 fine Americans.
They were exercising their right to assemble peaceably, to listen to political
speakers, to weigh the issues in the campaign of 1970.

Outside the hall, a mob of about a thousand haters gathered. We could see
the hate in their faces as we drove into the hall, and in the obscene signs
they waved. We could hear the hate in their voices as they chanted their
obscenities. Inside the hall, we could hear them pounding on the doors
as if they could not bear the thought of people listening respectfully
to the Governor of the State of California, the Senior Senator from California,
and the President of the United States.

Along the campaign trail we have seen and heard demonstrators. But never
before in this campaign was there such an atmosphere of hatred. As we came
out of the hall and entered the motorcade, the haters surged past the barricades
and began throwing rocks. Not small stones--large rocks, heavy enough to
smash windows. And not just directed at me, though some hit the Presidential
car--most of the rocks hit the buses carrying the Press and my staff, as
well as the police vehicles....

Some say that the violent dissent is caused by the war in Vietnam. It is
about time we branded this line of thinking--this alibi for violence, for
what it is--pure nonsense. There is no greater hypocrisy than a man carrying
a banner that says "peace" in one hand while hurling a rock or
a bomb with the other hand....

The San Jose police had driven the demonstrators away from the doors
of the auditorium and out of the official parking place. The motorcade was
parked in a circle, much like that of a wagon train under siege, with the
inside of the circle secured by motorcycle cavalry and the outside left
to the savages.... The President came out and did his usual thing--climbed
atop the car and wiggled the V sign to his cheering supporters and the cameras
behind them.

The Nixon people ringing the car... were not the only ones who hollered
at his signal. A reaction of fury and spleen was heard from outside the
ring of buses in the parking lot. One reporter, Martin Schram of Newsday,
said he heard the candidate "in a low, angry voice to a nearby confidant"
say, "That's what they hate to see." This murmured remark, overheard
by one reporter and by no other reporter or aide there at the time, amid
shouts and jeering and cheering, became the basis of a point of view of
many of those covering the event: that the President taunted the demonstrators
into violence. The reponsibility for the attack, under this theory, was
not so much the antiwar militants', but that of the President, who led them
into rock-throwing in order to cast himself in a sympathetic role, and to
focus public anger on the youthful dissidents.

The motorcade moved out of the parking lot and ran a guantlet of cursing
demonstrators. As Time reported: "The eggs began to fly even
before the motorcade moved out... Dozens of rocks were thrown, some the
size of a potato. They bounced off the President's well-armored car, and
they smashed windows in the press and staff buses tailing behind..."
I was in the staff bus with Rose Woods, the President's secretary, when
the rocks began to hit the steel sides. She said, "Just like Caracas"--she
had previous experience along these lines when Nixon, then Vice President,
was stoned in Venezuela--and she hit the deck in the aisle, shouting to
the rest of us to do the same. I, like a jerk, kept looking out the window.
When a rock slammed into the window on the opposite side of the bus, I was
showered with glass splinters, but with my face turned away, I was unhurt
and hastened to join my colleagues on the floor. In a minute, it was over
and the buses were roaring toward the airport...